Blogul unui automatist

So, let’s talk about the new OS. Yes, I know, I’m late again. People have been talking about it for la past 4 days. But I preferred to wait for a legal version from MSDNAA.

OK, let’s take it one by one:

Installation: It takes a little longer than XP, and it’a a lot less clear what the heck it’s doing to my computer. However, one must remember that Vista is almost 4 times larger than XP. So it goes pretty well.

First impression: I had Vista Enterprise Edition and my first impression was: Gee, I must have switched the DVD’s…That’s a black XP! Actually, there are some differences, like the start menu and the welcome panel, but the default settings were lacking AERO (even if my hardware allowed it) and the Sidebar. I had to look in the help center (which, btw, is pretty good) to see how I could activate them.

Security: There is clearly too damn much “security” in that OS. Every time I clicked on something in the Control Panel, the screen went dark and there was a popup asking: Are you sure you want to […]? If you have clicked the button, press Yes. Ofcourse I clicked the god damn button! Stop asking me stupid questions! Installing the flash plug-in for IE became an adventure. It actually took 5 minutes, out of which the actual installation was about 5 seconds 🙂

Looks: Now that’s something that Vista’s good at. AERO has some pretty cool effects (even if I had to dig for them in the help files) and the Sidebar can be pretty useful once you get used to it. The new IE7-like looks for Windows Explorer is also interesting and easy to learn.

Hardware: Not so good 🙁 Vista wasn’t capabable to see my embedded sound card and the XP driver did not work. So I’m stuck in silence :D, because my MB is too old to hope for a Vista driver. The other harware seemed to be OK, even if I haven’t tried all of the USB gadgets. Another bad point was the fact that Vista alone was eating up 75% of my 512MB memory. I can only dream of actually starting Visual Studio on Vista and still being able to do something on it.

Crashes: It’s a Windows, I know, but come on… 2 Explorer crashes in half an hour? XP SP2 had given me hope for more.

So, am I gonna keep it? No, because I can’t do anything useful with it (because of the lack of memory), I don’t like all the security warnings and my XP hasn’t crashed in a very, very, very long time 🙂 Why change something that’s working?

3 Comments to Vista

The UAP/UAC functions (annoying “Are you sure you want to…” popups) can be easily disabled/tweaked from the Local Policy settings.

Too bad about the sound – I managed to get my sound card to work with the XP drivers until the manufacturer released the Vista-ready ones.

Anyway, for consumer use, Vista might only be ready after SP1 or so… There are too many low level changes to ensure that all 3rd party drivers and applications work on the new OS. Until that happens, sticking with Windows XP might be a viable options for some.

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